2010·The social era·skill
QWOP
Four keys, one sprinter, and a game designed so that almost nobody can move forwards.
An early online video
This Moment began as something you played rather than watched. Originally published on web.
- SourceNot an upload originally
- MediaNot held by ViralWorld
What this was
You control an Olympic sprinter named Qwop. Q and W drive his thighs; O and P drive his calves. There is no run button. The result, for essentially every player, is a man collapsing face-first onto a track he has travelled two metres of, over and over, while a small crowd watches.
It first appeared in 2010, during the social era.
It is one of the earliest games to go viral because watching somebody fail at it is funnier than playing it, which made it a staple of the first generation of reaction videos and Let's Plays. Bennett Foddy, a philosopher by training, built the frustration deliberately, and QWOP is the founding text of the deliberately-punishing genre he later refined.
It has been the subject of machine-learning papers about whether an algorithm can learn to run it, covered by the BBC among others, and its name became a verb for any real-world stumble. Foddy went on to make Getting Over It, which is the same argument at greater length.
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Grouped by explicit relationships where evidence exists, and by shared theme otherwise.
Behind the recordWhere it came from
There is no original upload to identify: this Moment did not begin as one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is the record.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This Moment began as something you played rather than watched. Originally published on web.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
- What happens
- You control an Olympic sprinter named Qwop. Q and W drive his thighs; O and P drive his calves. There is no run button. The result, for essentially every player, is a man collapsing face-first onto a track he has travelled two metres of, over and over, while a small crowd watches.